The ogre is bad-tempered
He throws a fit
Hurling rotten stones
Giant stale rocks, to be more precise
The ogre wants fresh stones
And the dream doesn’t leave him alone:I want stonesTimely stonesMy exhaustion wants themLiving stonesStones that break away from your seconds fall over meStones that pour out of your mouths and cross your minds lie heavily on meYour stones aren’t healthyI want newborn stonesChild stonesStones whose stoniness hasn’t been tested or proven yet
The ogre pulls up the trees by the roots
Demanding stones from them
He yells at their trunks and leaves
Begs them
To show him the stones they have swallowed
The ogre looks for a massive stone
To fill the void of his father’s death
The ogre wants special stones
To put on top of shadows to stop them from moving
The ogre goes as far as threatening his inner-ogre
Demanding from him stones that can be applied to
Life and death alike.

3

His manner was far from ordinary
So was his gaze
Devastating storms of silence
Nested in him, always:He housed in his body a disintegrated planet with all its particles, history, and inhabitants

He could pick your star from the sky, eat it,
And spit out the seeds in the form of your
Distant and not-so-distant relatives
—at different stages of their lives.
Don’t take offense but
Where in this picture are you?
I am reporting back in a clear voice
But can’t see a trace of you anywhere
Wait! I bet you are the one who in the process of translation
Lost so much color
That you look almost dead in the other language
and only people like me
Appreciate you, even when you’re dead

If I list here the names of all of you that I’ve lost
Will we be together in one place, in silence?
Often I feel you,
Yes, I mean you!
Show me where you are in these images:
In harsh winters
He perched up on your rooftops
Hugged the square brick chimney and
Fell asleep.
Out of all the light and heavy notions of life
This was the only warmth
That made him drunk with joy.

He thinks from below the belt
Not his brain
He always carries a handful of human seeds that he can plant on a whim
They grow at the speed of light, stand up and move.
None of them surprised to see the others
All fixated on the time within their brains
Not even noticing who’s sitting next to them
Unless one recognizes the other and calls out their names inadvertently
To breach the air between them
To make them both alive.
They find each other
But what’s there to talk about on night zero?

When they come and sit on the edge of your shadow
One of them suddenly dives into it, falling back to his personal time
The rest stay away from it and return to where they were
Until the time comes for the shadow to form again, to be complete
I too have stood many times at the razor edge of these photos, smells, and memories until my knees gave out
Or until my heart was filled with temptation
At times I’ve even plunged into dreams
Pitch black throughout
Falling until there was no more end to my fear
The more my head hit the rocks,
The less I woke up
I was capable of dying twice
Three times
Over and over actually
This was my revenge on immortality
Only death could be alive
With no claim to wisdom, no pretension
If one day my face appears next to yours
Be kind to it so
It can fall asleep
Technically, it’s dead but sometimes gets playful and craves to come back amongst you
But like I said, it’s dead

A boy from behind a window sees it and asks his father:
“Daddy, when someone dies, does he take his shadow with him?”
“No, my little girl.”
“But I’m a boy, Dad!”
“No, my little boy.
Shadows don’t know what dying means.”

11

Death had on several occasions
Sniffed him up close
That’s why the texture of his words had changed
And he smiled constantly and his eyes were
Elsewhere
Not with us.

What the current order of things is:
Behind bars, covered in the dust of all these listed below you don’t know what meaning means any more: Pills, 11-o’clock shocks, 2-o’clock shocks, guffaws of the male and female prostitutes, files, your beard growing at the same speed as your madness, and the grass under your feet. The game is over.
Shoot!
Nothing like being screwed over, especially on an overcast day.
Shoot!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

What the rain brings: misery, curse, blood, ashes, suffering, hatred, First, Second, Dachau, Auschwitz, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Sarajevo, Afghanistan
(And there’s no ocean even in dreams to wash away a corner of this madness so
We can get lost without even remembering we’re dead)
We die
They die
They keep dying
And death is no doubt a profanity to name all the above.
Shoot!

28

Weight of one month of flying on our wings, our eyes
This is the first night we fall asleep next to each other, collectively.
“I’m young. It’s my first year of landing here, being with the other migrants.
My senses are so untouched, so fresh
Maybe that’s why—unlike others,
I can’t fall asleep. I don’t want to.”

He doesn’t know he’s experiencing
The happiness of happiness of happiness.

Translator’s Note:
This is by far the most fragmented translation project I have worked on. Fragmented in time, text, and paratext. I was introduced to the poetry of Shahram Sheydayi through A Stone for Life, A Stone for Death, his very last book. In March 2014, I received a package in the mail from a dear friend in Tehran who was once a close friend of Shaydayi’s. The note on the title page said: “For Lida. I hope you like Sheydayi’s poetic experience in the form of this long poem, so immeasurable, so mournful.” The lack of biographical context was unnerving, yet intriguing enough to lead me into reading the entire body of Sheydayi’s work. He was a very private person who chose to live a hermitic life in his last years, partly because of his illness, but mostly because he did not want to associate and be associated with many of his contemporaries, whose definition of literary modernism was reduced to formal gestures and swung more to a kind of rhetorical and linguistic extremism. This was against the ethos of Sheydayi’s work. Perhaps he could be best described as a conservative modernist who believed in poetry in the archetypal sense of the word. Sheydayi is a poet whose narratives are devastatingly honest, and that is why I wanted him to be heard and read.

A note on the story behind omitted lines in poem 23: these omissions also appear in the original poem. When I first translated the poem, I thought the ellipses were a formal or stylistic decision by the poet. However, I later discovered via the author’s website that these were words or phrases deemed inappropriate or immoral by the “momayyezi” (review board) of the Iranian Ministry of Culture, and hence removed. The publisher decided to put them up on the website, and so, in my next edit of the translation, I put those words back in. In subsequent edits, however, I decided to stick to the “original,” i.e., the censored version. I thought if the Farsi-speaking readers at home have access only to this version, why afford the privilege to the readership of the translated text?

Lida Nosrati is a refugee legal worker in Toronto. Her translations of contemporary Iranian poetry, short fiction, and plays have appeared in Words Without Borders, Drunken Boat, and TransLit, among others. She was a 2014 Witter Bynner Poetry Translation fellow at the Santa Fe Art Institute

Photo by Setareh Delzendeh

Shahram Sheydayi (1967-2009) was a contemporary Iranian poet, writer, lexicographer, and translator. In 2004, he founded White Crow publishing house, which featured original and translated works of poetry and short fiction by him and other writers. A Stone for Life, A Stone for Death: A Long Poem, was published posthumously in 2013.

Amuse-Bouche

Word from the Editor

Our stories can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell. In her essay “Alone in Company,” Chelsea Bayouth reflects on the role of an artist at the end of 2018: “For me, it is to fear that every word or image is a window into public, political, and social tumult. It means you have to be more vulnerable than you or anyone in times previous has ever been.” If we continue to write, to paint, to dance, to show up for ourselves and our art every day, we might find that our work transcends ambiguity and discomfort to reveal a greater insight into ourselves, and if we are lucky, into the world.